


Minutiae

by polyphenols



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Domestic, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyphenols/pseuds/polyphenols
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The very important issues that concern futuristic villains, such as sleeping, science fiction, and how to make your own ginger ale. Various unconnected drabbles and shorts, without much seriousness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 4 hours

Makishima Shogo only sleeps four hours per night.

By now Choe Gu-Sung is used to the soft shuffle of his lover moving through the house in the late hours, the rustle of pages next to him, sometimes, as he drifts off. When he stirs in the middle of the night he recognizes through a haze the warmth next to him, the regularity of both their breathing. Holographic rain runs down the windows, reflects transparent shadows on the ceiling above them like unreadable glyphs. When he wakes in the morning, however early, the place next to him in bed is already empty, an indentation barely warm.

I don’t mind this, Choe says. Though it is rather…

“Odd?” Shogo asks, smiling in that way of his which is inquisitive but not really. When Shogo asks a question, it is always from the vantage point of someone who already knows the answer. “Maybe I don’t sleep. Who knows, that just might be possible for someone Sibyl can’t read, don’t you think?”

“There’s a perfectly ordinary explanation,” Choe replies. “You just have an aberrant copy of the hDEC2 gene.”

“Ah, but it’s no good to let science take away the mystery of everything, is it?”

“It’s just the opposite. The more we study something, the more we learn about it, the more mysterious it becomes.” Like living with someone, he wants to add, sharing with them a certain space and a given number of years. It is impossible, it is absurd that Makishima Shogo can be defined by a series of numbers and equations, the helices of his existence unwound and translated into some universal code. Sibyl has agreed.

Let us begin, then, by learning what we do not yet know. Let me find out what it’s like for us to fall asleep together, to stay entwined until dawn.

He thinks of saying this but is not sure how it will come out, how it will sound in this foreign language. There are times when his accent slips, always when he is talking about the two of them, when he suddenly cannot find the right word and makes up for it with a frown that is half a smile.

So what Choe says, instead, is: “I wonder, do you dream of electric sheep?”

If he had been a moment slower he would have caught a paperback with his face.


	2. Zingiberaceae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They make ginger ale.

A few days into January, Makishima Shogo declares that he is going to make ginger ale. From scratch, he adds with a sunny little smile as he sits at the kitchen counter, a notebook dangling in one hand.

“Is this one of your calculated caprices?” Choe Gu-Sung asks. There is—as is usual for Choe—an unfinished bottle of Anterctic Dorops brand ginger ale sitting next to him. It is a perfectly good beverage, in his opinion, but Choe also knows well that in the eyes of Makishima Shogo, perfectly good is often just an excuse for the absence of change.

“Just an inspiration,” Shogo says. “Anterctic Dorops, my investigations lead me to believe, contains nothing but Hyper-Oats and synthetic flavoring. Not to mention it continues that execrable trend of deliberately misspelling English words, which really should have died in the twenty-first century.”

“Ah, next thing I know, you’ll be trying to replace my e-reader with paper books.”

“The desire for the natural in a world teeming with artifice is merely human nature, and you know I would like for more people to embrace the human. It is the desire to find artifice in the natural, à la Huysmans, that is reminiscent of madness. Perhaps that is the conceit behind the construction of Sibyl after all.”

“I think you have gone off on a tangent, Mr. Makishima.” Choe is not sure whether it is more amusing—and more unproductive—to let Shogo drop one of his innumerable literary or philosophical references without questioning it, or to ask for context that will take an improbably long time to explain.

“Then onto more practical matters.” The corners of Shogo’s lips turn upward with mischief, like those of a cat. “I would like your assistance in obtaining the necessary ingredients.”

“Ah, of course. It’s a pity that Mr. Senguji is no longer with us. If only you had had this inspiration of yours a little sooner.” Ever since the untimely demise of Senguji Toyohisa a few weeks ago, they had found some difficulty in securing rare and high-quality foods for their kitchen. This has really been more of a concern for Choe than for Shogo, as the former has been doing approximately 95.5% of the cooking for the two of them. But necessity is the mother of invention, and mealtimes (which, for people with a busy and only occasionally perilous life, can happen at any time of day) have been…creative as of late.

“It would be quite the calamity if we could not manage something so simple. It’s just ginger, sugar, and water, right?” Once in a while, Makishima Shogo speaks with an air of unblemished conviction that, while it cannot be called childish, still comes off as shockingly innocent. (Which is a better word than naïve.)

(There has to be something to add the carbonation, right?)

Choe Gu-Sung smiles and drains the rest of his bottle of perfectly good Anterctic Dorops [sic] ginger ale. “…I’ll do an extensive search on the ingredients at once.”

 

* * *

 

For all the duration of a few seconds, it had seemed like the carbonation problem was going to be easily resolved.

“I could just bring some club soda from the bar to mix it with,” Choe suggests. The bar is not just a convenient source of income or location for criminal activities, but also well-stocked with every alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage that the public could desire. Choe is quite proud of the fact, even if Shogo has been too busy, too reluctant, or just too _capricious_ to pay a visit.

“Beware simplicity for its own sake. The desire for convenience, for someone else to take the intermediate steps, is what has driven society into Sibyl’s arms in the first place.” Shogo says this, but Choe suspects he just finds adding ginger syrup to soda not enough of a challenge.

“Yet with something like this, there is no harm in deferring to the principle that the simplest solution is the best. What is that called again—some kind of knife?”

“Occam’s Razor.”

“Ah, right.” Choe smiles in the way that a casual observer might describe as indulgent as he scrolls through the results on his computer display. “Wait, look at what I’ve found here. This says ginger ale was originally an alcoholic beverage, made by fermentation with yeast.”

Shogo looks at the recipe with renewed interest, the glow of the screen reflecting as little squares in the clearness of his eyes. Which rather reminds Choe of a cat sticking its face between a person and his computer, whether out of curiosity or insistence on being in the way. “Then let us preserve the spirit of the original. And for the sake of your simplicity, it is probably better to work with yeast than compressed carbon dioxide, anyway.”

 

* * *

 

How to brew homemade ginger ale:

 

  * Acquire ginger, lemon, sugar, and yeast.  

    * Also water. Recipes from the 21st century don’t often consider the scarcity of potable water that isn’t from Anterctic Dorops. –S
  * Grate ginger, then heat with water and sugar to produce a syrup. Strain and add lemon juice after cooling.  

    * Remind Mr. Makshima that even a person of his superb motor control should wear eye protection when juicing lemons next time. –C
  * Add to bottle with yeast. Seal and shake.  

    * So far, much simpler than plastination. –C.
    * I am glad I leave such things to you. –S.
  * Leave to ferment for 1 to 2 days.  

    * Reminds me of mixing things in the kitchen as a young boy while playing at being a mad scientist. You often bring me back to the joy and mischief my childhood, Mr. Makishima. –C.
    * That isn’t relevant to the recipe, but thank you. -S
  * ~~Enjoy!~~



 

“It’s…” Choe Gu-Sung’s tries to choose his words tactfully, but his face already betrays him. “It could use some improvements.”

The murky liquid is an unfortunate combination of spicy, tart, and yeasty. “Perhaps the ratio of ingredients was not appropriate,” Shogo muses, and Choe wonders how _he_ had managed to keep from screwing up his face after taking a sip.

“There is something to be learned from failures too, as you always say. But what do we do with all this?” Choe gestures at the batch of unwanted ginger _liquid_ now sitting forlornly on the counter.

“If I knew what became of Touma Kouzaburou, I am sure he could be persuaded to take it, though I do not know if his hue would remain clear after a sip. But let us have something else, Gu-Sung, to chase away the memory of this experiment. Let’s open a bottle of wine or something.”

“Why not come down to the bar?” Choe asks, casual enough to not sound tentative.

“It will be inconvenient if I am connected to that location,” Shogo says, but it is not an outright denial. “Do you feel like making up a hologram for me?”

“No one there will be sober enough to remember seeing you.” For some reason Choe wants to see Shogo there as himself, the pale white of his hair and clothing stained in the hallucinogenic blues and violets of the club lights, the shape of his body melting ephemeral out of the shadows. A union of the person and the place most familiar to him in the world. He is not a poet, does not have the words of centuries of dead and remembered writers at his disposal as Shogo does, so he does not say it. But Shogo assents.

“Fair enough. Let’s go.”

* * *

 

More than a few hours later, and long past the official closing hour of the bar, they sit in the near-darkness passing a bottle back and forth between them. Makishima Shogo is sitting _on_ the bar, perched like a cat with a fondness for high places, looking utterly at ease. Choe looks at him, looks without describing it to himself as _admiring_ , while the shadows from the coelacanths in the giant tank across the room slowly traverse the wall and glide across their own shapes. It is this sort of calm, he thinks, that comes sometime after midnight when the air is cool and the night’s revelries have subsided, it is this sort of calm under which the stars come out and everything, without the assistance of words, makes sense.

Shogo takes a drink from the bottle (which is, in fact, Anterctic Dorops brand ginger ale, for they have both drank enough for the night, to the point of making loud and spirited toasts to _Zingiber officinale_ ) and hands it to Choe. “Do you like it?” Choe asks.

“It is a vast improvement over whatever we made ourselves.”

“Ah—then you do see the merit to trying things you thought you wouldn’t like.”

“As I had intended from the start. I wanted to make ginger ale because it was something you enjoyed.” Shogo says this with frankness and just the slightest hint of amusement. “But I had been too long in getting to the point. Because what better way is there to get to know you than to try the same things myself?”

“If I may say so, Mr. Makishima, you hadn’t even known that ginger ale was supposed to have bubbles.”

“Precisely. And now I do. But I _am_ curious, Gu-Sung. It is a pleasant drink, but of all the things you have to choose from, what makes this the one thing you make a habit of drinking every day?”

“Ah, well…it has character. It’s sweet, but subtly so. You’d have to get to know it well before you can appreciate that sweetness. And it has bite. Ginger, after all, has been used in traditional medicine for a long time, and this drink isn’t afraid to make itself known and to try to cure what ails you. It’s the combination of all these things, perhaps, that makes it just a little complicated. And it’s effervescent and weightless, in a way that’s hard to define, like it’s almost made of light. What I mean to say is…it has a lot in common with you, don’t you think?”

Before Shogo can answer, Choe puts the bottle to his lips and takes a long drink of the cool liquid. There is a sound he doesn’t recognize at first, which he finally realizes is Shogo laughing, in a manner that is natural and unreserved, almost boyish. He thinks that he had better finish the bottle before he can regret what he has just said, but Shogo takes it away from him with one deft hand, sets it on the bar without leaving time for protest.

“That was a bold assertion you made just now. I’d better give you the data to back it up.” And then Choe feels the warmth of Shogo’s lips on his own, pressed against where the cold glass of the bottle had left them just a moment before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to kumapillow @ tumblr for translation of The Capricious Criminals drama CD, which was a much-needed refresher for these characters and very helpful in writing this story. I hope that, many years later, my depiction of them hasn't strayed too far off.


End file.
